This invention relates generally to information models that support sharing of data between design variants within a family, e.g., within a product family, and more particularly, to sharing design data between completely configured variants of the product family using an occurrence model. The model addresses, for example, capturing hierarchical designs made of nodes that can be defined as in-place or as instances of other reusable designs, and applies to any domain involving hierarchical reusable designs.
Information models, sometimes referred to herein as data models, are increasingly utilized in design and manufacture of a wide variety of products, structures and facilities. As the complexity and variants of a particular product, structure or facility design increase, such modeling can provide numerous benefits including facilitating design and manufacturing efficiency.
For example, highly complex products, structures or facilities like aircraft, ships, off-shore oil drilling platforms and computational genomic structures are typically constructed using hundreds or thousands of mechanical, electrical and other assemblies, which in turn are comprised of numerous individual components or sub-assemblies. Collecting and managing data, in the form of data models, about such assemblies facilitates streamlining the design and manufacturing process of the product, structure or facility. Having such data also facilitates designing variants, improvements, and additional subsystems.
In addition, capturing such data facilitates a virtual product designing process. Designing and testing a product in a virtual environment (e.g., on a computer) facilitates reducing highly expensive physical prototyping and testing of the product. Virtual product design environments can save significant costs and time required for designing a given product, machine or facility.
Even things such as documents and powerpoint presentations, which have many variations that share significant content, could be modeled using the concepts described herein, in order to eliminate any duplicated data that would currently exist between all the variant documents.
In creating such a data model, having a minimal number of objects to capture design variants facilitates both management of the data as well as scalability of the model. For example, and for even a modest complexity product design, the model typically includes numerous objects. If each product variant requires nearly complete duplication of the model, then the number of objects significantly increases. As one example, there is a family of 747® aircraft with a number of variants, including a passenger 747® aircraft and a cargo 747® aircraft. Capturing each variant design within the family in an efficient manner with a minimal number of additional objects for each variant facilitates designing additional variants, improvements, and additional subsystems.
Bills of material (BOM) have been used to capture “product structure”. With such BOMs, however, it is extremely difficult, especially for complex products, to capture each variant in an efficient manner. In addition, and as used herein, the term “product structure” includes not only the product structure in the sense as with a bill of material, but also in other domains including system, geometric, and manufacturing domains.